A Satisfactory Future
by WhoCaresAboutPeopleBooksExist
Summary: It's years later. High school is a distant memory for Matty McKibben and his high school secret Jenna Middleton. A chance encounter startles them both awake from their mundane lives, and forces them to reevaluate the paths they've chosen.


**A/N:** Hello all fellow Jenna and Matty lovers! This itched at my mind last night until I finally just gave up on and sleep and wrote it. It's not you're typical love story, but hopefully you'll get something from it. It's a story of lost opportunity and a warning against giving into what you feel is right, but what you know is wrong.

If you feel so inclined, although it is a measly one-shot, please review, favourite, blah blah blah... Don't worry if you don't want to, of course.

**Disclaimer: I do not own Awkward. nor any of its characters/storylines. All lyrics belong to members of The Killers. This was written purely for fun, if you can call it that.**

_"The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past."_ Robertson Davies.

* * *

The day had crawled on at a pace that would make a snail race seem like the F1 championship. Customers drawled to him about their lives as if he could either magically fix them or top them up. His powers, unfortunately, did not allow him to conduct magic nor gloat to customers about his life. Not that there was much to boast about.

He shut off his car, listening to it as its engine spurted and shutdown. The song ended midway and the only light shining was that coming from his dangerously dim headlights. The suburban neighborhood he called home voted to remove the street lamps and he found himself cursing his "friends" every night when he returned from work.

Tired, the man stared at his home. Its white garage door hung loose against the ground and he wished room would magically appear for him to place his piece of junk in there, but the area was full of memories and clutter that no one wanted to look at. A light was on in the kitchen and he saw a shadow move behind the transparent curtain. His heart clenched with guilt in his chest as he sat there, not wanting to move inside to greet the person milling through the glass.

Silence had always been his kryptonite and he felt his mind dull significantly enough to provoke him inside. He removed the keys, grabbed his briefcase, and stepped into the chilly autumn air.

On his way up the stony path to his front door, he tried to remember what life was like a few years ago, before life actually set in. When he was more focused on girls than work. But his brain tortured him with images of the woman waiting up for him and he vanquished any memories that still attempted to linger behind his eyelids.

"Matt, you're home!" The man turned his face upwards from the ground at the sound, almost forgetting for a moment that his name hadn't been Matty for years. A woman dressed in a tight, red dress greeted him with a chaste kiss to his cheek. It was sticky and he had a feeling that if he looked in a mirror, a mouth-shaped mark of gloss would mar his skin. She shook her blonde hair in front of him and he watched as it fell in tendrils across her powdery shoulders.

"Yeah, is she asleep?" He asked, poking his head around the woman's mess of hair, looking toward the door at the top of the singular staircase. It was nearly shut, a crack the size of Matt's hand visible; a beacon of heavenly light for the gentle creature inside.

The woman nodded her head, "Has been for a couple hours. I think she's sick. I've made an appointment with the doctor for tomorrow." She patted his back, oblivious to his loathing of her touch. She seductively walked towards the sofa that sat in the living room. She tapped the spot next to her without looking at him, too entranced with the channel options to bother adding intimate eye contact.

Reluctantly, the withered man, not more than 24 but already past his prime, sauntered towards his woman, preparing himself for another night of loveless lovemaking on a rubbery-leather sofa with his wife.

When he reached her, she smiled blatantly at him, her teeth shining a false white too bright for her fake-tanned face.

As he kissed her, the disturbing noise of whatever guilty pleasure show she chose drowning his eardrums with its incessant whining, he tried to banish the images from muddling his thoughts, but they came just the same.

The snapshots sent a sickening burst of poison through his stomach, but he didn't want them to stop.

By the time she was naked beneath him and he was apathetically pumping in and out of her, blocking her fake sighs from his ears, the woman had transformed. Transformed to something that helped him along shamefully.

When he finished, the movement sending the shockwaves through his body he hadn't felt since a rushed supply closet job, he had to stop himself from crying out her name.

He kissed the girl underneath his lifeless body with flawed zeal, knowing she constantly picked up on it.

They cleaned up and got to bed, the act conducted between them pouring from their minds as they slept, each thinking of someone other than the body lying beside them all through the night.

Only in the morning, when the screaming cry of a babe shattered their dreams of another life, do they forget about their lackluster relationship and swallow their wishes of alienation from one another. They put on their masks of indifference and care, coming together if only for the sake of the small girl threatening to capture them both into a miserable and unfeeling bond.

* * *

It was her. Definitely. He'd watched the door for ten minutes now and not once had the face mutated to become someone else.

He absently sniffed at his underarms, checking that his deodorant and cologne were faring against the attack of nerves biting at his entire being.

The heart he thought was doomed thudded angrily against his ribcage, almost telling him vigorously that he still had breath in his body. That he was not a barren body of mistakes.

He didn't know what prompted him to follow the car. Well, she had brown hair slung by her left shoulder in a messy side braid. It didn't mean anything, not really. He had stalked many girls in the years since graduation, the day he realised that he finally had no more chances.

A pain choked him and it took him minutes to figure out that it was his chest seizing. Was he having a heart attack? Was she filling him with such hope and lust that it was actually killing him?

After more moments, he realised that he recognised the discomfort. Whenever he would see her after that time, his ribs would ache and his tongue would dry out, clogging any chance of speech.

It'd been years and the hold she had on him had yet to disappear.

For a few more unfaithful moments, he contemplated stepping out of his car heroically and approaching her, but then his knuckles would whiten against the steering wheel and he knew that wasn't an option.

He bent his head against the wheel and banged it into the hard thing again and again until a tap on his window drew his attention away from self harm.

"Sir, some people are a bit concerned, are you okay?" The voice took a moment to sink in, but his body definitely recognised it before he did. His palms began to glide down the wheel with sweat and blood whooshed south, creating an uncomfortable feeling against his work trousers.

He twisted his face around, not removing his head from the wheel, but rather choosing to rest it against the object. She identified him upon eye contact, her mouth opening wide and her breath hitching in her throat; words that would only ever be known to her caught on the tip of her tongue.

"You," she said breathlessly.

He didn't respond, just lifted his head and tilted it to his right. She shook her head unenthusiastically, giving in after only a few milliseconds and moving around the front of the vehicle, pulling on the door and slipping inside. He kept his eyes closed the whole time.

"No one will miss you?" He asked impatiently, flicking his hair towards the building in front of them. Foolishly, he chanced a look at her. She looked the same; if not for the slight lines on her face and the peeking of a tattoo against her collarbone he would have said she was still the same teenaged girl he met in high school.

She shook her head once more, only with added enthusiasm.

With a wedding band burning against his finger and an undeniable undercurrent of desire and excitement, the husband and father of one took off in his car with the girl who haunted his dreams and saved his nightmares.

* * *

Her words never asked how he knew about the sleazy motel, she simply followed behind him, nervously twisting at her fingers as she went up the steps and into the trashy room.

No voice ever sparks up as they make quick work of the others clothes.

This time, Jenna starts, slipping her fingers underneath his button-down furiously and scratching at his skin lusciously, the stinging only adding to his aroused state. She attacks his lips, pushing him to the bed with a force only she could conjure. Ripping is heard through the rushing of blood in his ears and he now feels the open air on his chest, Jenna running her hands along his bare skin.

He greedily explores the expanse of her mouth, sucking sweetly at the last remnants summer left on her cheeks. She moans gratefully into his lungs, filling him with a blow of hope. Elation runs through his veins as he guides his restless fingertips underneath her shirt to her chest.

She moves her hips against him and he stills her, wanting to first review the entirety of her. The bed makes distressing squeaks but he doesn't pause for a moment to consider the possibility of someone listening to them, hearing them.

He remembers all of this, the way she makes him feel. Dizziness courses through him like wildfire, starting a spark in his chest and spreading until his whole body burns with her touch, her scent, her breath. There's a sickly want hidden beneath their betrayal and he can feel himself getting off on it, can feel it spurring him on.

Matty, because he has become Matty once again, a teenage memory if nothing more, tugs at Jenna's hair and pulls her head up, yanking the shirt covering her innocence over her head. He grabs her bra strap and guides it down, smothering kisses on the tattoo scarring her collarbone, not taking the time to check the words. He doesn't need to, he memorized them the first night they did this, when this whole thing began.

_Return to the idealized past_

He places his lips up and up her throat until he meets her lips again. He bites at her mouth while getting rid of her bra, chucking it to the side the second the clasp becomes loose and wrapping her breasts in his hands, pinching and squeezing accordingly to her moans.

Jenna writhes above him and releases his mouth, twisting his hair through her fingers. He stops his hand movements for a moment, reveling in the feeling of Jenna Middleton threading her fingers through his hair. She manipulates his head and gets his mouth to hover above her chest, his hot breath coating the buds in ghostly whispers of want.

He gives in to her want and slicks his tongue against the hard surface, enjoying the satisfying taste and subsequent noises from Jenna's throat. He's eager and she's frustrated, her moans getting louder and louder.

Matty loves the way she releases her want through informal blubbering and wonders selfishly if she spills the same sounds when she's sleeping with her fiance. He only wonders because when he fucks (called that because that is what occurs between he and the woman he shares a child with) his wife, he never kisses her breasts like this, never whispers her name when he's done, and never loves her.

She's tired of his tongue's movement and he can tell because she's stopped fiddling with his head. He tries twisting them around, but she slams on his chest with her hungry hands, trailing a soft nail down his hairy upper body and places gentle kisses in the wake of her path.

His eyes sweep open and his hands find their way once again to her hair, pulling the strands away from her mouth. Jenna deposits a couple more kisses to his stiffening lower half before deciding it's time.

She climbs on top of him and they both slip away to naivety as she slides down.

They choose to forget the suggestive look the man who repeatedly sells them room keys gives them each time they escape here.

Gone from their minds are the nameless and faceless significant others that await their safe return.

He even banishes any thought of his baby daughter, crying in her mothers arms for the parents she'll never have. Sometimes he regrets agreeing to a baby so soon after marriage, but then there's not much he doesn't regret anymore.

For now, for these few minutes, hours, days they spend wrapped in each others arms, they pretend they're still in high school. They create fake places, drawn from their individual memories, and pretend they're there, making the kind of love only high school students who have fooled themselves into believing that those four years mean anything can make.

And for the minutes they become truly connected, actually one body, they can believe it. It isn't just a fantasy, a thought constantly knocking on their minds when they're apart, but the real thing, the thing that keeps them moving through their humdrum and overbearingly boring existence.

Matty blinks through the waves of pleasure that drag across his body like the salty ocean as he watches through heavy lidded eyes the bountiful Jenna move above him. He never thought feeling like this would be an option again. He had forced himself to believe that he would be damned to an eternity of heartless love.

Now, he powers through his day just to get here, to indulge in his long lost self.

The obscene slapping of her body against his isn't heard by him. He's too lost in her to hear anything above her cries for him.

He breathes out curses along with his own set of explicit noises while he grabs at her hips and lifts her so he can take charge of the situation. He thrusts his pelvis up rapidly, not caring about dragging this thing out, only wanting to feel that final burst of ecstasy only she supplies him with.

She bends down to kiss him. It's a sloppy meeting of tongues and lips, but it's powered by a need to stay in this tiny world of theirs. She whispers his name and he soaks it in, letting it sit on his tongue and slide down to his lungs to be absorbed through his little veins and capillaries.

It takes them longer to finish so he opens his eyes and pulls his head away from Jenna, allowing his mop of curls to land on the bed in a heap. He releases her, letting her flop gracefully on top of him again. Red scorching marks blaze before him where he held on and he can't help but smirk, hoping desperately that _he_ sees them.

Lifting himself up, he pushes Jenna back against the bed frame, telling her with his eyes to grab ahold of the metal bars. He gets to his knees and plunges into her again, rocking her body back and forth and feeling the satisfied sweat trickle down his back.

"I won't leave you," he says out of the blue, desperation lacing itself like vines through the words.

She replies, "I know," not to please him, he knows, but to trick herself into thinking that he won't leave and go back to the woman who cooks him dinner when he's late home from work.

Everything becomes frenzied then, their guiltless vows only lasting until they do.

Jenna rips at his shoulders and this spurs Matty on as the biting kiss spreading through him takes control. He thrusts deeper into her and she calls out his name over and over like it'll somehow make him the one she's coming home to.

He's ripping at her body quicker and with a battle cry of urgency, they both collapse.

They're defeated, deflated beings of guilt and shame. But they love each other more than any other humans on the planet. Or at least, that's what they tell themselves at the end to somehow make it okay. To make it right and not terribly wrong and damaging.

"God, Jenna," he groans under his breath, wishing both that this could be his life forever and that this could all just stop happening.

She props herself up on her elbow, tapping his stubbly cheek with her fingers, a smile of knowing on her lips. He foolishly goes over to her and sinks into her hold, resting his head on her chest and not caring when she winces out of pain.

He clutches her, wishing and hoping they could run away and never come back, reduce this thing even further. Make it what they live for. But then, it's already what they live for.

They wake up in the morning, the only thought on their minds each other; then they go to sleep, fuck their lovers only to be thinking of this moment right now and all the moments leading up to it.

He knows she's beautiful and understands that she'll always be his, even when she's married and has kids. He secretly craves for this to continue long after they've both grown up. Because they're still kids, just kids stuck in the daydream that is high school.

Although, he believes in the back of his mind they'll always be those kinds of people so obsessed with the past that they can't see the future. And it's his fault, for not being smart enough to choose her. He'll live with the decision for the rest of his life, fearing it to be the death of him.

There's an odor in the room, the mixed scent of the two forgotten lovers who make the thing they call love whenever they can. It smells sweet and lingers in the nostrils, giving you the feeling that you've just entered a most sacred sanctuary, where bodies are worshiped and lives are sacrificed.

And as the years pass, this hopeless lullaby of secrets continues. The pair, who slowly watch their individual lives crumble, never able to set free the aching they share, step inside this room with vendetta after vendetta.

Only when they're all gone, dying and alone with the inability to face their feelings raging further still, do they find the pure regret that scarred their bodies every single time they ignited their fiery touch.

* * *

_He takes her off her dress now, let me go. And I just can't look, it's killing me and taking control ... Jealousy, turning saints into the sea, swimming through sick lullabies, choking on your alibis. But it's just the price I pay, destiny is calling me. Open up my eager eyes, 'cause I'm Mr. Brightside._


End file.
